As this advertisement illustrates, an alarm system can stop a home invasion. Here’s the problem: can does not mean will. Let’s set aside jealous ex-boyfriends for a moment. Burglary is a far greater threat to your safety at home. Burglars tend to strike when you’re not around or asleep. If a professional burglar trips an alarm, he’d probably withdraw. But then, he’d probably have clocked the alarm company stickers and targeted a different house in the first place. Or, if he did target your home and saw the alarm company stickers, he would have cut the phone lines linking your Broadview system to the security company’s monitoring center. Unless you paid for the radio link upgrade, you’d be SOL. Needless to say, it gets worse from there . . .